Patrick J. LoPresti wrote:
>>>What I really mean is I'm still debating whether or not to develop
>>syslinux further, whether or not I should develop it further but in
>>a different direction, or take the project to maintenance-only mode.
>> You asked what it would take to replace GRUB. For that, I do think
> handling file systems other than FAT and ext2 is a requirement. Last
> I checked, SUSE still defaulted to reiserfs. And I have seriously
> considered moving my own systems to XFS. If you do not want to code
> support for each file system yourself (and I don't blame you), then I
> would suggest providing some kind of framework where other motivated
> hackers can add support for their favorite file systems.
>> File system "modules" was just an idea, as was the command-line stuff.
> They would be useful for floppy boot disks, which I myself have found
> handy once or twice. But I could still use GRUB for that if my system
> were normally booted by EXTLINUX (or XFSLINUX or whatever).
>
More filesystems isn't a problem; the framework for that is already
there, and with the EXTLINUX work I did a lot of (necessary) cleanup
that allows disk-based filesystems to share code. So supporting XFS and
Reiser is probably not that hard, although I need to make symlinks work
in EXTLINUX first.
It's supporting multiple filesystems *at the same time* that really and
thoroughly breaks the syslinux model. This could mean it's the wrong
model, and that's what I'm trying to assess.
>>In particular, I'm starting to seriously questioning the value of
>>some of the advanced features I have on the drawing board (and in
>>some cases, partially implemented) when built on top of the syslinux
>>framework. I don't want to spend a lot of time building those new
>>features if they are ultimately useless.
>> Well, I guess it depends on what your goals are. GRUB is certainly
> ripe for replacement in a lot of ways, IMO. It is bloated, the
> maintainers are largely non-responsive, and the whole project is
> pretty much stalled. If you want to try to supplant it, I think you
> will find lots of people rooting for you and wanting to help where we
> can.
Part of what I'm trying to do is to figure out what the goals should be.
Building on the syslinux platform, I think I can do a lot of things
*except* support multiple filesystems.
For one thing, I'm well on the way to have a graphics subsystem for
com32. It doesn't take that long to port standard libraries to libcom32.
-hpa